Recommended Procurement Webinars for October 31 – November 4

This is an incredibly busy week for procurement and supply chain webinars! The end of 2016 is filling up fast. In fact, there are only really 7 weeks left in the year once you subtract the weeks of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Click on the title of each webinar below to view the full description and register or visit the BMP events calendar to see what’s on tap for the rest of the month.

For everyone that wasn’t an American Lit major in college - ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ was a book published in 1974. It examined the meaning and concept of quality, specifically, whether or not quality is definable. This event will look at the quality issues related to supplier management and onboarding as well as their benefits - fortunately those benefits are not ‘metaphysical’ in nature. By the way, BEST PROCUREMENT WEBINAR TITLE EVER.

I’ve been looking forward to this webinar since it was first listed in early September. We can’t escape the fact that procurement has a talent problem. Since we’ve become more strategic, we have been more attractive to people in other functions, but we still need to focus our energy on getting the best and brightest Millennials if procurement is to keep pace with other functions. This webinar (which is actually multiple events staggered to cover several time zones) will cover all stages of the talent management process, from recruitment through to development and retention.

Aquiire (the artists formerly known as Vinimaya) and Ardent Partners are presenting a webinar this week that comes with a compelling freebee: a copy of Ardent Partners Report "P2P: Best-in-Class Blueprint." During the event itself, they will take on (and hopefully connect) two seemingly opposed ideas: real-time procurement/spend data and planning 3-5 years into the future.

About the author

Kelly Barner is the Owner and Managing Director of Buyers Meeting Point. She has a unique perspective on procurement from the numerous roles she has held during her 15 years in procurement. Kelly worked for Ahold USA (parent company of grocery chains Stop & Shop, Hannaford, Giant Landover, and more) on their not for resale sourcing team, specializing in systems implementation and hired services category sourcing. She spent three years as the Associate Director of consulting services at Emptoris before it was acquired by IBM in 2011.

Since 2009 she has covered procurement news, events, publications, solutions, trends, and relevant economics at Buyers Meeting Point. Buyers Meeting Point provides the procurement industry with an events calendar, blog, active social media network, and podcast, all of which are trusted sources of information for practitioners and solution providers alike. Kelly has several regular columns throughout the industry, and in the summer of 2016 was appointed to become the Business Survey Chair for the ISM-New York Report on Business.

Kelly has her MBA from Babson College as well as an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College. Kelly has co-authored three books: ‘Supply Market Intelligence for Procurement Professionals: Research, Process, and Resources’ (2014), ‘Procurement at a Crossroads: Career Impacting Insights into a Rapidly Changing Industry’ (2016), and 'Finance Unleashed: Leveraging the CFO for Innovation' (2017). In 2017, Kelly co-founded Palambridge with Phil Ideson (Art of Procurement).